Secrets of White Balance for Infrared Photography - Curves

This demo shows how to set a white balance for infrared images without a profile and without using any white balance or color temperature controls. It uses Photoshop, but it can be done with any raw editor supporting curves.

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Transcript for Secrets of White Balance for Infrared Photography 3: Curves. Duration: 7:30.

• 0:00 Can you white balance any infrared image without profiles? Can you white balance without even adjusting the color temperature? I'll show you how. Maybe you've mistakenly shot an image in JPEG and forgot to set a custom white balance. Or maybe your camera only shoots JPEG. Regardless of the reason, let's white
• 0:21 balance an image without white balance tools. I'll do this in Photoshop, but you can replicate this effect in many editors. Here's an image that I've shot with a 590 nanometer filter. This was shot in JPEG and it had a daylight white balance. So very red, this actually kind of reminds me, when I first started shooting
• 0:43 infrared, this is what the images looked like. All right, so let's get started on transforming this into a good infrared image. So the first thing that I'm going to do in my layers panel is I'm going to come down to the adjustment layers and I'm going to set a curves layer. So we'll add that to the layers panel curves. Before I
• 1:03 make any adjustments to that, let's add one more adjustment layer. I want to swap the colors because I'm going to need to be eyeballing the white balance. And so I need to swap colors. That'll give me a better way to do that. So let's go down to the adjustment layers and we will select channel mixer. The channel mixer will
• 1:22 allow me to swap the colors and then I'll be seeing my final colors. I'll get a better idea of what this looks like. Okay, so in properties, I'm going to go to the output channel red. We're going to change the red output channel red to zero and blue to 100. And then we'll go down to the blue output channel. We'll set blue to
• 1:42 100, red to 100 and blue to zero. Okay, so now I've swapped my colors. Now I get a better impression of what my final colors will look like. That'll help me to eyeball my white balance. Let's go back to layers. And now I'm going to start working in this curves layer. So let me hit the properties on the curves layer and
• 2:03 we'll start making some adjustments in curves. Just like the channel mixer, we're going to use the RGB color channels in curves the same as we had the RGB color channels in the channel mixer. Instead of the one channel here that affects all of them, we'll get out into the individual channels. So here we have our red channel,
• 2:24 we have a green channel. You'll notice that this channel doesn't quite fill up the space. And so what I want to do is I want to better use the curve in the green channel. And so I'll do that by grabbing this handle down here at the bottom and dragging it somewhere around the bottom of the histogram where the signal sort of
• 2:47 fades off. The signal really fades off here, but kind of near up here near the bottom, we'll get it kind of in this range. And then while I'm doing that, I'm going to be eyeballing the image to take a look at the clouds because ultimately that's my gauge for when this is white balanced is when my clouds are white. Okay,
• 3:05 so I've taken a shot at the green channel here. Let's go to the blue channel and the blue channel we can do the same thing. So I'm going to drag this slider at the bottom towards the bottom of the histogram where the signal ends, if you will. And while I'm going to do that, I can drag back and forth and I'm looking at these
• 3:22 clouds over here to see are they too magenta? Are they too blue? Where is a good middle ground? Kind of eyeball this and go back and forth till I get the look that I want. And I could go back and forth with the green and the blue channel to get this to the point where I like. This is not bad, but I think I can get a little bit
• 3:43 better. So let's make a change to the channel mixer to improve this. So I'm going to go back to the channel mixer. I'll double click the properties. That'll take me to my properties tab. And now I want to start making adjustments. So let's go to the output channel green. This finicky green channel, I want to get rid of it. I
• 4:00 want to make it go away. But if I make the green channel go away and just zero it out, now my colors are going to get all crazy. So I can't just make it go away. I've got to send it somewhere else. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to split it between the red and the blue channels. So I'll put 50% of the green into red and
• 4:18 I'll put 50% of the green into blue. Okay, you can see that that made a pretty dramatic change to the image. Now the foliage is a little bit more white, the sky and the clouds are a little bit more bluish. So now let's go back into curves and see what we can do from here. So in curves, I'll go back and click properties. This
• 4:38 will take me back into the properties for curves. And I'm going to look at each individual layer again. Let's start with the red layer. Now the red layer is pretty good in infrared because we've captured a lot of red. So not many adjustments here. I might make a little tweak to the bottom here. Again, I'm eyeballing the image to
• 4:54 see what the effect is. I'm not going to make any changes to the top. Let's go to the green channel and the green channel. Remember we eliminated the green channel in the channel mixer. So now if I make adjustments to the green channel, they don't do anything, nothing happens. So this is now irrelevant. I've made the green
• 5:12 channel irrelevant. Let's go down to the blue channel and we can make some adjustments again. So I'm going to do two things. I'm going to be adjusting the slider, but I'm going to be looking at these clouds over here to try to get them to be white. So little two blue here. I get a nice white color the farther I go.
• 5:31 And there's a bit of a balancing act here because the farther I go left, the more white I get and the more color that I get in the foliage, which is really nice. But I start to blow out the highlights a little bit. So try to find a little bit of a balancing act here for when that looks good. Let's stop here. This is not bad. What
• 5:48 else could I do to improve this image? Let me go back to layers and I want to click on my background and I'm going to make an adjustment to the highlights and shadows. So let's go into filter and select camera raw. Now some of you are saying, oh Rob, you're just going to open camera raw. So you can adjust the color
• 6:05 temperature. No, no, no. I'm not touching the color temperature. We're going to leave that alone. We're just going to adjust the highlights. We'll drag those down to zero and the shadows and kick those up. That'll give us a little bit more tonal range in this image. All right, I'll hit okay. And we'll go back to our image
• 6:23 and there we go. We've got a much nicer range of colors and tonality that appears in this image. And actually my clouds are pretty white now. I've got a pretty good look there. I could go back into curves at this point and go down to my blue channel. And I could tweak this a little bit to find the exact balance I'm looking
• 6:42 for. Get those clouds white, get the right amount of color in the image. And that's looking pretty good. So I'm pretty happy with how this image turned out. So is this my perfect workflow? Is this going to replace the use of profiles and color temperature? No, of course not. You're still going to get better results using
• 7:04 those tools. But on occasion, if you have to use this kind of a method, maybe to make a tweak, or maybe you accidentally shot an image in JPEG, or you forgot to set the right white balance while doing that, there are ways that you can adjust the white balance using other than white balance tools and still get pretty good
• 7:23 results. If you find these videos helpful on your infrared photography journey, like, subscribe, or comment. Hope you enjoyed. Thanks.